Account-based marketing (ABM) is a major trend in the ever-evolving field of B2B marketing. It offers some great benefits when compared to traditional marketing tactics. When you personalize your ABM plan, you put your business in a more advantageous position, from where it becomes easier to close more deals. Besides quality lead generation, personalized ABM helps you to:
- Achieve success even in a new market
- Reach the right prospects at the right time
- Increase your relevance among targeted prospects
- Shorten the sales cycle by only focusing on ideal prospects
- Avoid wasting time and resources on deals that are not likely to close
What is ABM?
ABM is an extremely focused and strategic approach to targeting a defined set of high-value accounts to convert them into customers. In ABM, each targeted account or prospect is engaged using immensely personalized campaigns. Both marketing and sales resources are utilized to create personalized experiences for the target audience as they move through the buying cycle.
According to SalesIntel’s ebook B2B Marketing Strategy: Stepping Stronger into 2021, personalization is a major reason B2B marketers prefer an ABM approach. Further, 97% of marketers agree that ABM results in a stronger ROI than other investment strategies.
Now that you know the significance of personalization in ABM let’s go through some powerful ways to personalize your ABM campaigns to win more business.
5 Ways to Add a Personal Touch to ABM Efforts to Increase Deal Closing
Looking to personalize your next ABM campaign? Try these five powerful techniques and see your close rate rise.
1. Automate email personalization to boost response and contact rates.
In modern ABM, it’s not enough to personalize your campaigns. If you are to target and reach your best-fit accounts faster or before your competitor gets them, you need to use automation. Using automation doesn’t mean you throw ABM personalization out of the window. In fact, it enables you to better personalize your ABM campaigns to close more deals. In other words, you benefit from both personalization and automation.
Besides email content, you can easily automate the personalization of SMS content in an ABM campaign. All you need is the right tool at your disposal. For instance, VanillaSoft’s SMS and email marketing features automatically personalize SMS’s and emails based on key contact variables you already have or can gain through a data provider. Additionally, you get to send automated drip emails to quickly nurture leads, create targeted lists, embed personalized video messages, automate appointment reminders, and more.
2. Make sure your database is well-prepared for a personalized ABM strategy.
In ABM, using highly personalized content is a must to target the right accounts.
Creating content for your ABM strategy requires you to know who you’re targeting, have an ideal customer profile, and properly segment your target audience.
Your database plays a major role in meeting the campaign personalization requirements.
Before planning an ABM strategy, it’s essential to ensure you’re using a clean, updated, and enriched database filled with accurate and sufficient contact and company data. Avoid data decay as much as possible.
Statistics show that data decays by as much as 60-70% annually.
3. Don’t hesitate to take a different route. Surprise prospects with direct mail.
Direct mail recipients spend 28% more money and buy 28% more items compared to people who don’t get that same piece of direct mail. Using direct mail in your ABM strategy is a proven way to improve personalization because it’s tangible, memorable, and helps build strong connections with influencers and decision-makers.
Integrating direct mail into an ABM plan also opens up the key benefits of a multichannel marketing approach. Direct mail makes a significant contribution to creating a true omnichannel experience for the target audience, provided it’s strategically used alongside other channels like email, phone, and social media. Before sending a direct mail to your target account, make sure you study their persona, buyer’s journey stage, and buying intent to gain maximum ROI.
4. Avoid feeding prospects with generic content. Show them you’ve done your homework.
There’s no point in beating around the bush when targeting prospects with your ABM content. Get right to the point. Educate your prospects about your brand and how your solutions can solve their problems or directly impact their bottom line. Reduce the use of all-purpose, one-size-fits-all content, and focus on creating relevant, value-added content for your target industry, company size, and decision-makers. Create blogs, webinars, videos, ebooks, and other content that address your target audience’s specific needs.
One of the most effective ways to create content for your prospects is to understand their industry-specific pain points, interests, behavioral signals, and unique persona. Use intent data to gain deep insights into all of these factors to create content that’s hyper-relevant and appropriate to the specific buyer’s journey stage of your target accounts. Intent data also enables you to narrow down your ABM targets by identifying accounts showing the most propensity to buy.
5. Get the right ABM tech stack in place to improve your personalization game.
If you think customer relationship management and content management system are the only technologies important to executing a personalized ABM strategy, think again. There’s a range of technologies you can use to personalize your ABM efforts. An ABM tech stack framework could comprise simple tools like website personalization and complex, feature-rich systems like sales engagement and marketing automation.
Before finalizing technologies for your personalized ABM game, make sure you measure the success and the performance of each of them against your personalization and revenue goals. Choose technologies that can easily integrate with other personalized ABM tools, bearing in mind that your strategy and tech stack could change for each account or industry you target.
Wrapping Up
Once you implement the five strategies discussed above, you’ll easily personalize your ABM initiatives to drive a tremendous ROI and closed deals. Before you implement your personalized ABM strategy, you need to ensure your business is ready for it.
Start by carefully evaluating your technology infrastructure, sales and marketing processes, pricing, and target account lists. Lastly, don’t forget to align your sales and marketing teams so you can better personalize your ABM campaigns. If you want to know how to further prepare your business to take a personalized ABM approach, read this must-have guide on ABM strategies to set yourself up to close more deals.
About the Author:
Jason Hubbard has literally grown-up in startups, including helping to grow three top 100 Inc. Fastest Growing Private Companies. Most recently, Cirrus Insight was number 41.
He now serves as the VP of Partnerships and Alliances for SalesIntel.io.
SalesIntel is the most comprehensive contact and company data provider that helps you target your ideal prospects and accelerate revenue growth. SalesIntel is the top provider of accurate and affordable sales and marketing contact data.
